Minor point: I appreciate your weaving in passages from classic books and classical thinkers. Makes it more of a 3D intellectual experience.
Separately, the worthwhile economist Niall Ferguson wrote, in his highly illuminating The Square and the Tower (2019 maybe?), how power structures throughout history have been a series of hierarchies…
Minor point: I appreciate your weaving in passages from classic books and classical thinkers. Makes it more of a 3D intellectual experience.
Separately, the worthwhile economist Niall Ferguson wrote, in his highly illuminating The Square and the Tower (2019 maybe?), how power structures throughout history have been a series of hierarchies (I.e., the tower) collapsing into networks (the square) and re-forming into new hierarchies. He postulates that we’re closer to the 16th century now than we are to the 20th, which was the height of hierarchical power (with Stalin as the apex), due to the internet and social media having collapsed those hierarchies into networks, much as the Gutenberg printing press did at that time. He dutifully details the realities of both scenarios.
I know this is perilous territory, but if history does indeed rhyme, it would be fun to hear your strategic insight into where “this” is all going. Given your tech background, which is the new variable in this ancient cycle, how about you give it a go, and take a grounded, thought through WAG at where the world will be in 50 years ( just about after I’ll have been returned to the ether).
I know asks for predictions can be annoying, but I and many others think that this point we get the problems (more or less). What if you went sci fi and showed us where we could be, and, even more interesting, what our current and future practical and moral predicaments might be?
Minor point: I appreciate your weaving in passages from classic books and classical thinkers. Makes it more of a 3D intellectual experience.
Separately, the worthwhile economist Niall Ferguson wrote, in his highly illuminating The Square and the Tower (2019 maybe?), how power structures throughout history have been a series of hierarchies (I.e., the tower) collapsing into networks (the square) and re-forming into new hierarchies. He postulates that we’re closer to the 16th century now than we are to the 20th, which was the height of hierarchical power (with Stalin as the apex), due to the internet and social media having collapsed those hierarchies into networks, much as the Gutenberg printing press did at that time. He dutifully details the realities of both scenarios.
I know this is perilous territory, but if history does indeed rhyme, it would be fun to hear your strategic insight into where “this” is all going. Given your tech background, which is the new variable in this ancient cycle, how about you give it a go, and take a grounded, thought through WAG at where the world will be in 50 years ( just about after I’ll have been returned to the ether).
I know asks for predictions can be annoying, but I and many others think that this point we get the problems (more or less). What if you went sci fi and showed us where we could be, and, even more interesting, what our current and future practical and moral predicaments might be?
After all, everyone *loved* The Twilight Zone.